Way, Way Too Much Information

Back in the early 1990s—the age of pagers and dial-up modems—I read an essay
that changed my life. In "Thinking About Earthworms," author David Quammen
described the concept of the global mind. Philosopher Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin (who dubbed it the "noosphere," meaning an atmosphere of thought)
considered this collective consciousness "wonderful," but Quammen urged his
readers to resist its pull. He advised us to spend some time in our own minds,
to turn off our televisions and think about things no one else was thinking
about—earthworms, for example.

As a writer, I have always strived to carve out this place
where I can think my own thoughts, where I can let all that's rolling around in
my mind congeal into something (hopefully) new and interesting. But if that was
difficult to do two decades ago, when Quammen wrote his piece, it's a million
times more difficult now.

Today, it seems that we have access to an unlimited amount of
information all the time,
and for those of us who want to be alone with our thoughts, that information is
getting harder and harder to avoid. According to a 2003 study by the School of
Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley,
in 2002 human beings created five exabytes of data—or thirty-seven thousand
times the amount of information stored in the Library of Congress.

Just last year the International Data Corporation released a
study that estimated global data creation at 161 exabytes in 2006 (picture
twelve stacks of copies of War
and Peace, piled from here to the sun), and predicted that by 2010
the number will reach 988 exabytes. Also in 2006, 1.1 billion people were using
the Internet regularly, checking approximately 1.6 billion e-mail accounts. And
even as Americans continue to watch an average of eight hours and eleven minutes
of television each week, time spent online rose 24 percent from 2006 to 2007,
according to a study by the online market research firm Compete, Inc.

This avalanche of information is threatening to swallow us
whole, to waste our days, and to overwhelm our own thoughts. Essentially, it's
the noosphere on steroids. What does all this mean for writers? It means that
from the comfort of our own chairs we can research the hell out of whatever
we're writing, while keeping up on the latest celebrity scandals, political
polls, and the flood of e-mail. But a growing body of research shows that we
pay a price for this constant stream of information. More and more of us suffer
from a condition sometimes called "digital information overload," or
"infomania." The bottom line: Our brains simply are not wired for taking in so
many things at once.

A study published in 2005
by the King's College London suggests that the distractions of e-mail and text
messaging effectively rob your functional IQ of ten points. Another study, done
at Kansas State University, suggests that watching "the crawl"—the stream of
headlines scrolling across the lower portion of the television screen—reduces
memory retention by roughly 10 percent, and a brain imaging study at Carnegie
Mellon showed that when performing two tasks at once, a person's brain activity
is only 56 percent of what it was when that person focused on the two
activities separately. In other words, when you try to do too many things or
are too distracted, your brain simply doesn't work as well.

There is another, perhaps more important consideration for
writers: the loss of creative space. In his book Hare
Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (Ecco,
1999), Guy Claxton cites several studies that point to an "unconscious
intelligence," which works while our mind is disengaged or working on something
else entirely. Ideas emerge from a kind of creative womb, one that works while
we are focused on some mundane physical task, like walking, or riding a train,
or staring at the ocean. Just letting the mind run.

But if simply staring at the ocean and allowing your unconscious
intelligence to do its work is difficult in this age of too much information,
there is another state beyond that, which has become—speaking for myself, at
least—even harder to attain: flow. As described by the psychologist Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi, it's a state of mind in which you are so engaged in an
activity that you lose track of time—even lose track of yourself. You forget
about everything around you and wake up kind of surprised to find yourself back
in your room. The state of flow is when your best work gets done, and when
writing becomes really fun.

But can writers—in spite of the constant pull of e-mail,
cell phones, and TiVo—carve out the space for this to happen? In 2003,
psychologists at the University of Toronto and Harvard found that creative
people are much more likely to have what's called low "latent inhibition," the
ability to look at an incoming piece of information, classify it, and then
discard it automatically if experience has shown it is likely to be irrelevant.
"The brains of creative people," they wrote, "appear to be more open to
incoming stimuli," and more likely to remain in contact with that stimuli for
longer.

This is good news for
those of us who are trying to create something original out of the material of
life, but what does it mean for our ability to stay on task and actually create
it? Could one of the building blocks of creativity—an openness to new and
interesting things—become an obstruction?

Tom Bissell, author of the memoir The Father of All Things (Pantheon Books,
2007), seems to think so. He plans to move to Estonia, in part to escape the
digital distractions of American life. "I'm nowhere near as effective or
diligent a writer I was only a few years ago," he says. "The two best places
I've ever worked were the high Canadian Arctic and Vietnam. In neither place
did I have easy Internet availability or any other similar distractions. This
cannot be a coincidence."

Like Bissell, author Pico Iyer is drawn to remote places in
order to avoid some of the common distractions of civilization. The author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of
the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Knopf, 2008) lives in rural Japan, where
he has no cell phone, no car or bicycle, and gets no newspapers, no magazines,
and no English-language television. "A day without any of these beeping
distractions," Iyer says, "seems to open up to the point where I can often
spend eight hours writing, and another hour or so taking care of business
through e-mails—and still have time for an hour or two of playing Ping-Pong, a
couple of long walks around the neighborhood, and at least an hour of sitting
out in the sun reading a good novel."

Not everyone goes to such extremes, but many do. Nathan
Englander, who isolated himself for the years he was writing his first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases
(Knopf, 2007), says that "the biggest thing is you have to be able to not
answer your phone, not check your e-mails, not check your texts for a few
hours. If you can't, you're just not going to do it."

Of course, there are writers who don't seem too bothered by
technological distractions. "With a strong, compelling idea in mind, I'm not
distracted by the world," says Chuck Palahniuk, whose ninth novel, Snuff, is out this month
from Doubleday. "Conversely, if an idea is so weak that I can't ignore the
world, then that story's not going to lift and distract my readers from those
same demands for their attention. If I can write in a crowded airport, then my
work can be read in that same setting.... Plus, I only check the e-mails on
Monday and Friday."

I wondered how Quammen was
holding up, all these years later, in the twenty-four-hour blogo-cyber-mediasphere.
So I dialed information, the old-fashioned way, and called him at his home in
Bozeman, Montana.

"I do have a cell phone now," Quammen admits. "And I have a
TV hidden away upstairs, but it doesn't get any channels. It's more of a box
that plays movies. I'm still out of the loop enough that I've never seen a
video replay of the space shuttle explosion, and I've still never seen a video
replay of the twin towers falling. I happened to be at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon on 9/11, so I completely missed that."

Still, Quammen says, he uses e-mail every day and loves being
able to contact his wife and parents while he's traveling abroad. But when he
sits down to write, he turns off his phone.

"For me," he says, "that's one of the most crucial things for
writing: When you sit down for those two hours or five hours to write, you turn
off the telephone and are not accessible to every person who decides to dial
your number. But e-mail still gets through."

Even Quammen has been pulled, as he says, "kicking and
screaming into this connectedness."

Frank Bures has written for Esquire, Tin House, World Hum, and other publications.

“In 2002 human beings created five exabytes of data—or thirty-seven thousand times the amount of information stored in the Library of Congress.”